Bug 2224661

Summary: Clarification about control characters in audit.log
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Reporter: Paulo Andrade <pandrade>
Component: auditAssignee: Sergio Correia <scorreia>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: BaseOS QE Security Team <qe-baseos-security>
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 8.8CC: alakatos, sgrubb
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OS: Linux   
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Last Closed: 2023-07-24 14:01:30 UTC Type: Bug
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Description Paulo Andrade 2023-07-21 21:09:27 UTC
The character ^], from 'man ascii':

       035   29    1D    GS  (group separator)       135   93    5D    ]

is common in /var/log/audit.log. Is there some explanation for it?

  Apparently it was not the case in 2.8.5 (rhel7), but appears common
in audit 3.0.7 or newer.

Comment 1 Steve Grubb 2023-07-24 12:44:38 UTC
Yes, the group separator is used to mark the end of the event and the beginning of interpreted data. This standard has been published for at least 7 years:

https://github.com/linux-audit/audit-documentation/wiki/SPEC-Audit-Event-Enrichment

This information is processed by the audit utilities to accurately determine user mappings when the logs are viewed on a remote system.

Comment 4 Paulo Andrade 2023-07-24 14:01:30 UTC
Thanks Steve. As you described earlier (making it clear here) if one wants
to avoid the control character, can set 'raw' to 'log_format' in
/etc/audit/auditd.conf, but that will cause the logs to not be transportable
to other systems.